Top producer a book of knowledge on sheep
Central Otago sheep breeder Robert Gardyne has been named the most consistent producer of the tenderest, tastiest lamb in the 10-year history of the Glammies awards. He reveals all to Rob Tipa.
It would be fair to describe New Zealand’s Lamb Producer of the Decade Robert Gardyne as a perfectionist, someone who is constantly looking for that elusive X factor that sets their stock apart as the tastiest and tenderest lamb in the country.
Back home on his family’s farm near Oturehua in the Ida valley, he says it is a huge honour to win the title, which he regards as the only true national competition for lamb.
He has entered meat quality competitions for more than 40 years, qualified as a finalist in the Glammies eight times and won the coveted grand champion title for the first time last year.
Following an independent assessment of yield, tenderness, succulence and colour the top 20 finalists of 166 entries this year were selected for the final judging by Beef + Lamb New Zealand ambassador chefs in the grand final at the Wanaka A&P Show on March 10.
To mark the 10th anniversary of the awards, Beef + Lamb NZ collated the results of the last decade to find the producer with the most consistently tender and tasty lamb.
One conspicuous detail in the fine print of the Glammies results this year was that four of the 16 farmer finalists used rams from Gardyne’s perendale, texel and texel cross studs.
‘‘The most pleasing thing about the Glammies is that each year we have had ram clients qualify as finalists right through, so it wasn’t just us,’’ Gardyne says. ‘‘That’s been really important because they’re the ones that really count.’’
He says it is very satisfying that some of his clients have been buying rams from him since he started breeding sheep and they are some of the Alliance Group’s top lamb producers.
In the past, some clients have won their particular breed sections and were within a point of winning the grand champion title overall.
Gardyne’s son Grant, who works the family’s 489ha Klifden Heights farm alongside his father, describes him as ‘‘a book of knowledge on sheep breeding’’.
‘‘What’s special is his ability to read an animal,’’ Grant says. ‘‘You either have stockmanship or you don’t. I think it’s fair to say he’s an elite stockman, but he’s always fine-tuning. He’s never finished.’’
Asked to explain his consistency in the Glammies awards, Gardyne identifies feeding and breeding as key elements in their success.
‘‘Clover is the key to sheep farming,’’ he says. ‘‘Sheep would prefer 70 per cent clover in their diet if they have a choice. And the key to growing clover is ph levels, boron, molybdenum, potash and sulphur.’’
In New Zealand, average pastures often look like they have plenty of clover content, he says, but when you actually weigh it, the clover content only represents five to 10 percent of the pasture mix.
Not a lot of farmers bother with a herbage test, so they often have no idea if they have mineral deficiencies or if they need trace elements such as boron or molybdenum.
The Gardynes regularly cut and bag samples of pasture, weigh the clover content and analyse trace elements to detect any mineral deficiencies in their pastures.
Gardyne says the advantage clover has over ryegrass is its uptake of trace elements, especially cobalt.
Animals get nearly all of the cobalt they need from clover because it virtually dissolves in their stomach, he says, whereas with ryegrass they can’t extract all the cobalt during digestion before it passes through their gut.
The Gardynes are well aware of the need to replace soluble elements such as boron and potash, which freely leach into the soil profile under the little irrigation they use on pastures on their lower terraces. ’’For every tonne of dry matter removed in balage - for every three bales you take off - you have to replace it with 20kg of potash,’’ Gardyne says.
Applying molybdenum can give a 25 per cent increase in pasture production alone and is a key for clover production.
Gardyne’s history in sheep breeding goes back nearly 50 years. He is a third generation sheep breeder who was brought up on the central Southland Plains near Winton. His father and grandfather had romney studs, but he chose perendales when he started breeding stud sheep in 1970.
When he sold an angus cattle stud, he started breeding suffolks and then put all his suffolk stud ewes to texel rams and half his perendale stud flock to texel rams when that breed’s genetics were released in New Zealand in 1990.
Some of the Gardynes’ ram clients weren’t prepared to go to the extreme of a purebred texel, so Gardyne experimented with suffolk-texel and perendale-texel crosses.
‘‘We artificially inseminated 296 ewes in one day to eight different rams and we learnt very quickly about the texel,’’ he says. ‘‘We were very fortunate a lot of those rams bred very well. Several times since then we’ve tried a first cross again, but the first cross has not been equal to the ones we’ve interbred that we’ve been selecting the best rams from.’’
‘‘When we talk about a suffolktexel it’s not just about hybrid vigour because we’ve been breeding them for 26 or 27 years,’’ he says. ‘‘So selecting and keeping the right females is just as important as using the right rams.’’
Gardyne believes part of his consistency in meat quality competitions is possibly related to selection of his maternal lines.
‘‘Even in a commercial situation, you have to ask each farmer what is his criteria for the ewe lambs he is keeping because he could do an awful lot by selecting the right ewe lambs,’’ he says.
While he acknowledges ram selection has a big influence on meat quality because its genetics are spread across the flock, he believes farmers can help this process by selecting the right ewe lambs.
Over the last 40 years Gardyne has regularly entered meat quality competitions to gauge the progress of his stud flock development.
Gardyne used muscle scanning technology of his young rams at Agresearch’s Woodlands station in Southland before that was commonly used in the industry and has used CT scanning on occasions.
Over the years of competition he has also observed big changes in market trends.
‘‘Meat on a good lamb can be 50 per cent more than the meat on a poor lamb, yet it costs the meat company the same to process both lambs,’’ he says.
Because the Glammies is based on taste and tenderness, he says the competition aims to improve the whole industry by encouraging production of the type of animal markets are looking for.
Another relatively new element in assessing meat quality is ph levels, which weren’t considered a factor until one year when a lamb with the highest ph lamb was selected as the overall winner of the Glammies.
After three generations of intensive farming on the Southland Plains, the Gardynes’ move to dryland farming in Central Otago has been a ‘‘bitter sweet’’ experience adjusting to the extremes of farming in wet and dry climates.
‘‘I think it’s easier coming from an intensive farming background to a dryland high country property than the other way round,’’ Grant says. ‘‘Not many things have to falter in an intensive situation for it all to turn to custard.’’
Their tussock hill country in the Ida Valley between 460 and 940 metres altitude has responded well to lime applied at two tonnes per hectare followed up with boron, molybdenum, sulphur and coated seed.
The Gardynes have just recorded their best lambing ever, with one scanned mob of commercial ewes cracking the 200 per cent lambing barrier for the first time. They tailed 203 per cent through the tailing pen, an improvement on 196 per cent last season.
A season out of the box has helped produce their best lambs yet with their first draft of lambs on January 5 - straight off their mothers on the tussock hill block killing out at 18.9kg at less than three months of age. Their second draft of lambs on January 21 from their twin flock also had an average carcass weight of over 18kg.
‘‘I’ve never seen growth like that, even in Southland,’’ Gardyne says. ‘‘You couldn’t put your foot down anywhere without standing on clover.’’
While he is obviously happy with the results of a good season, he says there is always room for improvement with some finetuning. Meanwhile the Gardyne family’s search for the most efficient animal continues.
Clover is the key to sheep farming. Robert Gardyne